Country diary: this lofty tree is a pandemic survivor

Crook, County Durham: Once as quintessentially English as a Constable painting, wych elms have been laid low by diseaseThe wych elm, Ulmus glabra, tall as a two-storey house, arching over the lane, had been hiding in plain sight. We must have walked under it scores of times but hadn't paid attention until today, when its flowering canopy, with starbursts of crimson stamens clustered along every twig, stopped us in our tracks.Such sights had been a distant memory. When I was a child in the 1950s, lofty English elms, U procera, home to a cacophonous rookery, cast shade over the barns on the farm in Sussex where my grandmother worked. In the 1970s, when we lived in Warwickshire, rows of giant elms were the guardians of field boundaries, as quintessentially English as a Constable painting. Continue reading...